As Long As I Live

Finished

To everyone who has had to wait for so long for an update and especially all those who had to keep asking me to update, my most sincere apologies.

To all those who remembered and offered me their best wishes, I can't thank you all enough.

Love you all loads!

Enjoy!!

******

Darkness was his best friend. It provided solace, it provided peace, it provided the silence for one to think. Most of all it provided the refuge for one who wished to escape the glaring lights under which men and women like him were judged and subsequently hated. It was a blanket that covered their faults in a world desperate to uncover them, and then punish them for it.

When would this world understand a simple fact, he thought, no one is born evil. Men are not genetically engineered to be minions in their mother's wombs. They become evil because of the world around them that shaped their mentality that way. Their circumstances, their experiences and their hard-learned lessons make up who they are.

He was no different.

What right did this awful world have to label him a bad person? Where was this world when he had to suffer through his entire childhood for the smallest of bare necessities that became luxuries he could only dream of? Where was this world when he had to dream of a family for in reality he had none? Where was this world when he needed comfort over the loss of his mother, his guardian angel, and he was left with the monster he called his father? Where was this world when all his father was teaching him, with a slap or punch accompanying every lesson, was that money was everything.

Money was, indeed, everything.

It meant freedom, luxury, happiness, contentment, joy. It meant life!

So what if he was devising unusual ways of getting money. They might've been dishonorable, but they weren't illegal or wrong. And as far as money was concerned, he had soon stopped caring whether what he was doing was in any way illegal or wrong.

He wanted money, anyhow.

He would not return to that world, that time, when he was helpless, hungry and in pain. He would never beg for food anymore like he had to beg his father, his own damned father, for nourishment.

His five year old self sat in the corner of the one bedroom apartment staring in horror at the big six-legged spider that was coming hurtling in his direction. With a squeak he buried his face in his mother's drape that he used as a blanket. That piece of cloth still smelt like her. It helped him think that she would come running from the kitchen to kill the bug that was scaring her son.

But she no longer came from anywhere to save him. She was gone forever, his daddy would tell him. Since she was gone there were more and more bugs around the house. It scared him. It made him cry.

He peered up once more and tearfully looked for the horrifying creature and screamed in terror when he found it by his foot. Screaming and crying, the little boy ran to his sleeping father in the bedroom and woke him up.

"Daddy! Daddy! Wake up! Pwease! The buggie will eat me!"

His daddy, furious at having been woken up from his sleep, slapped the little boy so hard he was sent flying off the bed and onto the hard floor.

"You little piece of shit! How dare you wake me up! You need to be taught a lesson that worthless bitch of a mother didn't teach you! You won't get any food for a week! You hear me, you little creep! Get out of my sight!"

No one came to his rescue then, so no one had the right to label him now.

Time for revenge! And how sweet was the taste of vengeance! He would avenge his childhood, the love he lost, his innocence and the cruelty of having lost his lone benefactor that was his mother. It would bring him peace.